Act III, Scene 1:
In England – medieval or Renaissance or modern – a title of nobility is only a title, right? It carries some privileges, but no territorial jurisdiction, estates, or revenues. Nor “mouables.” So what makes an earldom such a juicy bribe to one who already holds the higher title of duke?
Income?
I’m not an expert on English history, but I don’t think that your premise is correct - noble titles could carry any and all of those things during the medieval period, AFAIK, and the transition from that state of affairs to the modern English nobility (which is very much as you describe) was a slow one and just beginning in the Renaissance period of Shakespeare.
Can somebody run over to GQ and fetch an English economic historian for us? 
I always presumed the “Earl of Hereford” would collect rent and such from property in whatever geographic boundaries “Hereford” described. Hence, Hereford might be a juicier bit of real estate to control vs. Buckingham.
Hereford probably wasn’t juicier than Buckingham (there’s a reason the latter is a dukedom rather than an earldom), but it’s not like he’d be taking a demotion. After he got the reward, he’d be Duke of Buckingham and Earl of Hereford, both.
I don’t know about the circumstance here, but in general nobilary titles carried with them the manors attached to that title. A wise noble would avoid the almost overwhelming temptation to consolidate his holdings into a contiguous bloc — as in definitely ‘owning’/controlling most of Norfolk — which would arouse suspicion and envy, in favour of possessing dozens of properties randomly scattered across the Kingdom. Less power and influence that way, but a steadier income and retention of such income.
In practice, most properties would accrue to a family by marriage rather than grants or conflict/lawsuits; which is why a King took a keen interest in births, marriages and deaths among his aristocracy.
Money’s exactly right. The jurisdictional powers were cut short over the years but most titles above baronets had some income and manors connected to them.
Also, an additional title means you can either leave two of your sons exalted hereditary titles OR that you can confer the lesser one onto your oldest son while you’re still alive.
Any connection between historical accuracy and RICHARD III is purely coincidental, but the real Duke of Buckingham was as high born as you could get without being in direct line to the throne, a descendant of Edward III by one of his sons and one of his daughters and thus a cousin of Richard III/Edward IV as well as the Lancastrians and several different ways. He was one of the richest nobles in the land from birth. His hatred of the royal house, or at least his resentment, was due to the same factor most people, Lancastrians and Yorkists, resented about Edward IV: his queen.
Stafford’s father and his grandfather were both killed fighting against the Yorkists (Richard’s family) leaving him a very wealthy orphan in his early teens. Wardships were always like blood in the water to nobles: the legal guardian of a wealthy orphan received a big percentage of their income, sometimes taking more than they were due and running the inheritance into the ground (think “parents of child stars”) but rarely leaving them better off than they found them. For starters in “How I learned to frigging detest Edward IV by Little Henry Stafford”, his wardship was assigned directly to the queen, Elizabeth Woodville Grey.
If you’re not familiar with her, she was lowborn by royal standards (her father was a minor nobleman) and the widow of a Lancastrian knight when she met Edward, then still fighting for the crown. By all accounts- including those by people who hated her- she was stunningly beautiful and even those who were in favor admitted she was greedy and selfish. She secretly married Edward when she was a widow he was still fighting for the crown and she kept him wrapped around her finger until he died. (Not completely I suppose: he did have mistresses and affairs and lots of bastards- but still managed to have a bunch of kids with her.)
The most hated thing about her was that she raised nepotism to new highs. Her family was fertile as alleycats (her parents had 15 children or thereabouts) and she married them all into the richest and most noble families; most infamous was when she married her brother John to the extremely wealthy Duchess of Norfolk when he was about 19 and she was almost 70. She also gave the wardships to any orphaned children of very wealthy families (including those orphaned due to being killed in battle or executed by her husband) to various of her relatives, and she took more of a role in public policy than most thought a queen- especially one who was queen only by virtue of a marriage that most thought never should have happened in the first place- should take.
When Stafford came to the age of maturity and she was about to lose control of his revenues, she decided to keep them in the family by betrothing him to a girl who happened to be her sister, Catherine Woodville. By all accounts it was a pretty miserable marriage, but he had no choice and it benefitted nobody but the Woodvilles. It did produce several children though.
Stafford remained loyal under Edward IV’s reign- after the Lancastrians were completely defeated there wasn’t a lot of reason not to be- but you can understand his resentment. Among other factors he had almost as good a claim to the throne as the Yorkists and to the remaining Lancastrians he was a much closer relative to Henry VI than Richard III was, and he was popular in regions of the country that didn’t like Richard. (Richard’s popularity was mostly in the north- which was odd, because he was the first Yorkist actually liked in York- they had gone Lancastrian during the wars.)
He was an indispensible ally to Richard immediately after Edward IV died and helped him literally seize custody of Edward V from his uncle Anthony Woodville. This he did probably because he hated the Woodvilles with a passion even if they were his close in-laws and wanted their power destroyed. After Edward V was illegitimized by the revelation Edward IV had not been free to marry when he wed Elizabeth Woodville Grey (he had been betrothed or plighted to another woman- a betrothal is less than a marriage but it’s more than an engagement, and this probably wasn’t even the only woman he’d done that with- Eddie had a tendency to promise women he’d marry them if they required it in order to sleep with him) which Stafford had to have relished in he seized his chance to break the Yorks once and for all by alligning with Henry Tudor.
There’s a lot of speculation by historians that if his rebellion had been successful and if Henry Tudor had won at that time (he ended up never setting foot in England due to storms and other problems) he probably wouldn’t have then rebelled against Tudor. He certainly had a much better claim to the throne than Tudor, who was a descendant of a bastard grandson of Edward III (true it was a bastard line that was later legitimized, but still a big stigma) and a bastard son of Henry V’s queen, while Stafford’s ancestry, though through daughters, was legitimate, and also Henry Tudor wasn’t a seasoned warrior and still had many enemies in England.
Anyway, he took a big risk and failed miserably and lost his head. By most accounts he did not make a dignified death. His estates however were allowed to pass to his children (i.e. they weren’t confiscated). After his death his widow married Henry VII’s uncle Jasper Tudor (one of the illegitimate sons of Queen Katherine de Valois), a man much older than she was, and then married a knight her own age when Jasper Tudor died.
You don’t mean incestuously, I presume?
As others have said, titles often did carry with them income – in particular rents from farmers working the land attached to the title. To this very day the royal family, in fact, collects a lot of money through its holdings the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall. (Although it turns over all its income to the government in exchange for an allowance.)
This issue has come up in the current television series Downton Abbey, in which a key plot point is that the Earl of Grantham’s daughters stand not to inherit anything on the death of the earl, because all the property and income associated with the estate automatically goes to the person in line to inherit it, and it is difficult if not impossible to separate the estate from the title. The current title-holder has control of it only for his lifetime.
I believe that this would be limited by the rules of inheritance created by the grant. I believe that most peers did not have the option of choosing who would inherit their titles. Most commonly, the same person (eldest son) would have the right to inherit all of them and there’s nothing that the current holder could do to change that.
The monarch, of course, can in theory do whatever he or she wants with titles and peerages, because they all originate in the monarch.
Edward’s son and daughter weren’t married to each other, and I don’t think the Duke of Buckingham was descended from any of Edward III’s daughters. He was descended from two of Edward III’s sons, though. He was the great grandson of Thomas of Woodstock, and both great grandson and great-great grandson of John of Gaunt.
The reason why the Duke of Buckingham would have wanted the earldom of Hereford is because that earldom had been extinct since the death of the 7th Earl, Humphrey de Bohun, in 1373. The de Bohun lands had then been divided between the 7th Earl’s two daughters. Buckingham was the heir to one of those daughters, while the other half of the estates had passed to the Crown as the other daughter married Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV. So what Richard is promising Buckingham is that, by granting him those estates, he will allow him to reunite both halves of the de Bohun inheritance. The advantage for Buckingham in gaining the title would be simply symbolic - it would just remind everyone that he was, in effect, the 7th Earl’s heir.
Correct, at least for the fifteenth century and for quite some time earlier.
Of course, holders of peerages invariably had substantial estates and those were often also granted by the Crown, sometimes specifically to ensure that the holder’s wealth matched the grandeur of his title. And ideally the choice of territorial title would relate to somewhere the holder held lots of land. And, yes, the title and lands would usually descend together down the male line.
But there was no necessary connection between a peer’s lands and his title. The rules for inheritance weren’t exactly the same - the usual difference being that between heirs male and heirs general - and the estates could (usually) be sold.
No. The reason that the Crawley lands must follow the Grantham earldom is because the lands had been entailed. Earlier generations of the family had chosen to restrict the descent of the lands to the heirs male and to restrict the current owner’s rights to settle the lands as he so wished. The whole point is that this required special arrangements, because otherwise English law specified that, in those particular circumstances, the title and the lands would separate.
You start with “no,” but then give an explanation that is not inconsistent with what I said. The descent of the title is governed by the grant of nobility created by the crown. That can’t be changed, and that’s the reason why Mary will not inherit, because the grant specifies only male heirs. The devise clause in the will of the prior Earl of Grantham (referred to as the “entail,” but actually a “fee tail”) locked the inheritance of the estate’s properties and chattels to the descent of the title. As Grantham himself has said, in order to separate the properties from the title in order to benefit Mary, it would require breaking off the entire estate from the earldom, essentially leaving it an empty title.
Of course, if Buckingham actually gets an estate called “Hereford” with the title it is well worth having; since, there, as in Hartford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.
You’re right: he’s the descendant of Edward III’s sons but through daughters. I misread the (you must admit very confusing) family tree.
Typically having a title meant you were able to collect rents owed to that title holder; Earldoms, Baronies, Duchies, Marquessates and Viscountcies all traditionally referred to seigneurship over certain parcels of land. Some parcels were larger and more valuable than others.
Over time, some parcels would be reduced in size, titles were consolidated, and sometimes a noble who controlled many titles might grant a title to a son but the son would gain only a small portion of land that had formerly been associated with that title when it was held by separated individuals. However, the laws concerning such things in Medieval up through early modern England (900s-1600s) are about as murky and convoluted as it gets. So it wasn’t always the easiest thing even for a title holder to consolidate the land holdings of his many titles under one title.
For example I might be the Duke of Kazakhstan and the Baron of Moravia, and I might desire to combine the lands of my Barony with that of my Duchy, such that all my land holdings are part of the “Duchy of Kazakhstan” and continue to hold my Baron title just as an “additional honor.” That sort of thing often times would not be legal and would go against custom; so typically titles almost always carried land with them. It wasn’t until relatively recent history that in the United Kingdom you had honorary peerages that were created solely for the purposes of giving someone a special title and honor, without land grants. I’m not sure how far back the creation of landless titles goes, but I do believe the Duke of Wellington didn’t attain any control over specific lands when he was made a Duke, even though the title is hereditary.
If you go back further though, when Henry VIII would create a ducal title for a favorite, they did come with lands. When he created (well, re-created) the title Duke of Suffolk for his friend Charles Brandon that entitled Charles to lands and rents, real power and prosperity. That was how early modern English monarchs could influence people and events. Since disgraced nobles (and nobles who were attainted) would often have all their lands forfeited to the crown, those lands could later be distributed and new titles created and given out to favorites, but a title without land would have made little sense in the 1500s. I’m not saying they definitively would not have existed, but if they did it would be odd circumstances where one noble who held many titles simultaneously ended up with a title that had lost most of its attached land but the title itself never passed on to any other family or person.
I’m pretty certain that most of the Younger Pitt’s flood of titles ( which were openly opportunistic sales bargains, in addition to stocking the House of Lords with Pittite tories [ composed often of ex-whigs alarmed by the French Revolution — Pitt, now thought of as an arch-tory was himself of course the son of a more famous whig ] ) carried no land rights. And nor after during the reform act of 1832 when Grey created peers en masse to carry the bill.
Having a title wasn’t what it had been…
I had always presumed it was simply his desire to become the Duke of Earl.
Nothing can stop me, now
'Cause I’m the Duke of Earl
So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah my liege.
No, it is still a ‘no’. You cited the Downton Abbey scenario as an example of how ‘titles often did carry with them income’. But it is instead an example of how titles were often held by individuals who happened to have landed income. The Grantham earldom itself had no income, even if the family had arranged things to ensure that its holder would have.
I would have thought the Earldom of Hereford contained a lot of moo-ables.
